What is SEO, what’s it good for, and how do I get my hands on some? It’s a valid question. The world of digital marketing is a nebulous one that moves far too fast for most people to keep up.
To begin with, a simple explanation. SEO is an acronym and it stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is the process of optimising your website for search engines, so that it will be recognised as relevant and show up near the top of the results when people search related keywords. SEO attempts, basically, to make sure your site is visible to internet users.
I can't take a picture of SEO, so here's my cat instead. His name is Peter.
What’s more complicated is how to achieve that search engine optimisation—and there are many, many parts to it. Links to your site both internal and external, meta titles, URLs and their structure, sitemaps and more all help to boost the SEO of your site. However, content is the major part of it. Well written home pages, landing pages and blog content which are helpful and relevant to potential customers or clients are essential to optimising your search engine success.
In the past, it was all about stuffing in as many keywords as possible. So, some companies would put walls of text with variations on something like “bungy jumping queenstown” all over their sites and change the colour of the text to make it invisible. Nowadays, google is much smarter and rewards quality rather than sheer quantity. Relevant keywords are still very important—and a google adwords specialist is able to track down and define the best ones for a specific business—but they should be used with a frequency that makes sense in the content. Keyword stuffing is no longer helpful and in fact is penalised by google, sending pages filled with invisible keywords down in the rankings.
Essentially, google wants to deliver helpful, readable and quality information and entertainment to its users, and they have developed extremely accurate algorithms to make sure they find it. If your site is well equipped with good and logically structured content, strategically used keywords, informative blog posts and clear, accurate writing, it is much more likely to do well in search results.
There is screeds more that could be written about SEO. It is such an important concept in this age of digital marketing that it has become an art and a science, with entire agencies dedicated to helping businesses and people optimise their websites for search engines. It’s a complicated topic, and can be overwhelming; ensuring your website has quality, relevant content is a great place to start.